A case study submitted to the Research Excellence Framework 2014 demonstrating the impact of the University's research.
Refactoring is the process of improving the design of a system without changing what it does. It can go hand in hand with program development, or can be performed as a part of program maintenance.
The functional programming team at Kent, led by Professor Simon Thompson of the School of Computing, built the first comprehensive tools for refactoring functional programs. Programmers in both open source and commercial projects use the tools to improve their programming practices and to restructure existing systems. This improves the quality of the software, reducing problems for end users and costs for companies. As a result, the tools are increasingly used by mainstream developers.
Since the projects are open source, others can support them by contributing their own code; contributions have come from the UK, Europe and internationally.
The Research Excellence Framework 2014 showed that Kent ranks 17th in the UK for research intensity, has world-leading research in all subjects and that 97% of our research is deemed to be of international quality.
Contributing to the University’s REF success were the number of our world class publications, the number of research active staff and the demonstrable impact our research has made to the sciences and to economic, social and cultural understanding.